Exhibit is a lightweight structured data publishing framework that lets you create web pages with support for sorting, filtering, and rich visualizations by writing only HTML and optionally some CSS and Javascript code.

“No Database, No Web Application” means that you can create your own exhibits using just a text editor. Don’t let those sophisticated features scare you. It’s quite easy to make exhibits.We even let you copy data straight out of a boring spreadsheet and convert it into an exhibit automatically.

So, where’s the database, again? The data is stored in JSON files, and the database is implemented in Javascript and running inside the web browser.

Less is more: the less people have to learn, understand, write, etc., the more they will adopt the technology. For example, compared to RDF, Exhibit saves authors from learning what ontologies are, why URIs are so essential, how resources differ from literals, what namespaces mean, etc.

Una piccola sintesi…

In this paper, we present Exhibit, a lightweight publishing framework that lets people write web pages that support structured browsing and rich presentations, assuming only passing knowledge of HTML and Javascript.Exhibit provides a faceted browsing and sorting user interface with several switchable views like map and time line.The published structured data can be copied directly from the web pages in several formats, from generic formats like RDF/XML to domain-specific formats like Bibtex.

Anche questo passaggio e’ molto importante…

Existing applications for generating web sites that support structured browsing, e.g., online photo albums, are all domain-specific.Exhibit is domain-independent. These applications work by processing data supplied by the author and churning out whole web sites containing several web pages hard-wired together. The author can select one of several themes, but there is little further personalization of the output that can be done compared to Exhibit.